Oh! It is harder! Or, Has anyone actually finished this damn thing?

So, as I posted a couple of weeks ago, I've been playing lots of Dragon Quest IV DS and Final Fantasy IV DS so far this summer, since portable gaming is easier to do with a new baby in the apartment than console gaming. I've branched out a bit since then, but it's still a bit more convenient to squeeze in the DS and the PSP between the other things I've been up to.

ANYWAY, I complained at some length about the difficulty of Final Fantasy IV before backtracking a bit and saying that the game wasn't "that hard." Well, I take it back. FFIV DS is hard, and it isn't just me, as I learned when I read these old 61FPS posts by Bob Mackey and Nadia Oxford. "Medieval brick shithouses" or not, Cecil and Kain, as well as their various sometime accomplices, have a crap-ton of a tough quest ahead of them in this version. Several days ago, my 40ish-level war band of Cecil, Kain, Yang, Rydia, and Rosa stomped into the Tower of Babil (sic) only to be repulsed by a rabble of high-level random monsters and one sonofabitch Flamehound. I'm still not sure why, but the Flamehound really gave my party a tough time, and they found themselves making an unplanned retreat in response.

This was just the bottom floor of the tower.

Yeah, I haven't quite made it to the moon yet, and in light of Mr. Mackey's column, I think I'm completely justified in quitting at that point, but I'm starting to think that maybe the writing's on the wall already: this FFIV is a tough bastard, and maybe I should just go back and play some FFIV Advance. I do like those old FFIV sprites, and I want to get started on FFIV: The After Years (though maybe I shouldn't). Also, FFIV used to feel like comfort gaming, and I guess that's sort of what I was in the mood for with this one, though Square Enix can hardly be blamed for changing things up and adding a bit of variety to this classic.

But I'm sort of a glutton for punishment, and it would be cool to know that I've finished the hardest possible version of this game. I mean, what else do I have to do this summer, aside from parenting and finishing my dissertation?